Was famous stovepipe hat really Abe Lincoln’s?
By Dave McKinney Sun-Times Springfield bureau chief April 14, 2012 12:00AM
James M. Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield shows the Abraham Lincoln hat in the museum's collection. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times
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Updated: May 16, 2012 8:18AM
SPRINGFIELD — It bears the floral stamp of an 1850s-era Springfield hatmaker. It remained in the possession of the same southern Illinois family for a century. And it fits a head about 22 inches in circumference — the same as Abraham Lincoln’s hat size.
But did this iconic, beaver-fur stovepipe hat really once have a place atop the head of Honest Abe? For the first time, the people who run the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield — who have long proclaimed the hat was Lincoln’s and continue to insist that — are admitting they can’t pin down how, more than 150 years ago, a farmer acquired the stovepipe hat. That missing detail has injected an unexpected air of doubt about the authenticity of one of the museum’s prized showpieces, a historic icon valued at $6.5 million that’s a cornerstone in the museum’s fund-raising pitches and that, until now, has had a provenance once thought to be indisputable. “In a court of law, there are different levels of assurance,” said James Cornelius, curator of the museum’s Lincoln Collection. “The Scottish legal system has guilty, not guilty and not proven. We elected in this country not to take that third option, in which the presumption of guilt is kind of heavy. I guess, if you want to be pushy about the hat question, you’d have to judge it in the not-proven category of Scottish law because it cannot be proven or disproven.” That acknowledgment, in response to inquiries from the Chicago Sun-Times, follows the February disclosure that a portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln donated to the state by the Lincoln family, which has hung in the Executive Mansion for decades, was a fraud.
The hat changed hands again in 1990, when Lincoln collector Louise Taper bought it from Hickey for an undisclosed price. She, in turn, parted with it in 2007, selling it to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation as part of a $23 million haul of Lincoln memorabilia in 2007. The purchase was proclaimed a coup for the museum. The museum won’t say how much the hat cost but, for the first time, it has produced a 2007 appraisal valuing it at $6.5 million.
If one of those scenarios is true, the other can’t be. But that doesn’t mean the hat is a fraud, said Wes Cowan, co-host of the PBS-TV show “History Detectives” and an expert in historical artifacts who owns a Cincinnati auction house.
The story of the hat was first written in August 1958, when Carbondale resident Clara Waller signed an affidavit in which she said her father-in-law, William Waller, obtained the hat from Lincoln “during the Civil War in Washington” and, upon Waller’s death, it was passed on to her husband, Elbert Waller. William Waller had been a Democrat in the 1850s but incurred his neighbors’ wrath by bucking the region’s pro-slavery mind-set by backing Lincoln, a Republican, in his 1858 U.S. Senate bid against Democrat Stephen Douglas, according to Cornelius. The hat was sent on loan for a large Illinois State Historical Library exhibit in Taiwan in 1988. It later appeared in 1993 and 1994 in San Marino, Calif., and in Chicago during a high-profile tour of major Lincoln artifacts known as “The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America.” The hat was described in a catalog co-authored by former Illinois state historian Thomas Schwartz as one that Lincoln “wore . . . during the Civil War.” Schwartz declined an interview request, referring questions to the Lincoln museum. “I guess you’d say we’ve taken something of a historic liberty in re-dating it to a much more plausible time and place,” Cornelius said of the hat. But that contradicts the Weller affidavit — which had never been made public until a Chicago Sun-Times reporter asked to see it. Lincoln, who did give gifts to friends and admirers, wasn’t known to have given away any of his hats, Cornelius said. There also are no newspaper stories from the 1858 debate, photographs or letters between Lincoln and William Waller to corroborate the hat changing hands that day in southern Illinois. Further evidence that validates the hat is that it was held in the same family for a century and scooped up by Hickey and later Taper, two of the pre-eminent collectors of Lincoln memorabilia, Cornelius said. “Not only did the Waller family believe it and have it, Louise Taper believed it and had it after Jim Hickey believed it and had it,” he said. “There’s nothing to indicate to us that it’s not what we’ve inherited.” Cowan, the PBS host, doesn’t think the Lincoln museum was duped, but he encourages it to present both scenarios when the hat is next exhibited. When displayed previously at the museum, it has been linked to William Waller, but the uncertainty over how Waller got it has been sidestepped. “I think the issue that I would bring up over and over and over again is that there is no unbroken chain of custody, that the facts as they are known surrounding the top hat are compelling, but, ultimately, they can never be proven,” Cowan said.
